Raye Beasley

poultrytalkontario.net or kijiji ontario will have what you are looking for.

I have a 75 gallon stock tank with gold fish.  I don't do anything other than refill it when the horses drink it down. If it gets too murky I bail it out down to a few inches and refill.  I originally stocked it with 12 little fish from the pet store. All but three went belly up almost immediately. The metal tank froze up the top six inches on a daily basis throughout last winter. I didn't expect the fish to survive but this spring I found an additional three babies in there. So far they are all still mucking about in the horse trough without any interference from me.  Gold fish are considered an invasive species so don't put them in a pond where they or their offspring can escape.

The problem may not be so much the sawdust, but what was ingested by the horses before it came out the other end. Horses are fed vast amounts of wormers, drugs of various sorts and have a high probability of being fed hay that has been sprayed with herbicide. It is a very common occurrence for people to spread bought manure and have their gardens become toxic to plants. Many have had to remove the top soil and replace or grow in another location for a few years or more depending on what was used on the hay fields. Not saying this is the problem, but it sure sounds like a strong possibility.

I bought grass hay one year to top up my own. Because I knew of this problem, I made a new manure pile in a problem weed area when I cleaned the corrals in the spring. Sure enough, there were no weeds growing on the top of the heap that summer; bad sign. I never buy hay any more. Its safer to down size to a self- sustainable level for the bad times.

As previously stated, cows must be bred to produce milk. You probably heard about cows not being bred after the first calf and still milking. You can drag milking on for way past the usual time if you only need a few cups to maybe a quart. Eventually though, it gets so it really isn't worth the trouble. It doesn't make sense to forgo the meat from the calf and all the butter and cheese you could be making with a yearly bred cow or get some chickens/pig and feed the extra unwanted milk to them.

Also, when I was growing up, we had a Holstein milk cow. It was open range and what ever bull she could find was the daddy; it was either Angus or Herford in those days. We ate the boys and milked the girls.

Two weeks ago, I had an Angus cow lose her calf during birth. Since none of my four Jerseys are currently milking, I got that old girl in the chute. It took a few hours of kick the can, but she got milked and I have lived to tell about it. My beef cows are not pets like the dairy cows. Today, she comes running like a pro with the Jerseys for a bit of a treat and milking. Her milk is very white and not much cream so the milk isn't much good for butter, but she gives around 3 gallons a day. My Jerseys are good for 3 gallons plus feeding a calf. This is a grass fed girl with only around 2 cups of grain so I don't have to go fetch her for milking.

I just started bee keeping 4 years ago. I bought my first nucs from the only treatment free breeder here. Thats what the fellow advertised and what I thought I was getting. When I picked them up, I mentioned that I was going to continue treatment free and he got this "funny look" on his face. He came clean told me that the nucs weren't really treatment free but he did have some but was sold out. The old bait and switch.

Fast forward 4 years. I started with 2 nucs which survived treatment free for 2 years. I split them the second year removing the original 4 nuc frames and replacing them with foundationless frames for a total of 4 hives.

The two original hives winter killed and I split the two splits making a total of four more hives. One skipped town one day last summer and I have 3 surviving hives this spring. No treatment and no mucking about with them other than to make splits. They are free to make drones and queens and bugger off if they feel like it. I am trying to get up to 10 hives so that I can have a 50% loss rate and leave them with enough honey to feed themselves and make a bit for me.

Turns out that my odds with treatment free neglect are no worse than the what the treated beekeepers get around here, and I think its only going to get better the more generations I can get through without losing them all.

I never tell anyone that I don't treat. That way every one can sleep easier.

As others have said, there is not a lot of white in a goose egg compared to yolk. You can use a goose egg in most recipes instead of chicken eggs. Keep in mind that generally, 2 chicken eggs equals 1 duck egg or 3 chicken eggs equals one goose egg for good enough home baking. If you need more accuracy, than you need recipes that go by weight of ingredients rather that quantity. Duck and goose eggs make amazing custards and ice cream.

Goose and duck eggs are great binding agents for hamburgers and meat loaf as well. I find them too rich and too big for a fried egg, but thats just me.

Roberto pokachinni wrote:

It looks like a pack rat super highway. How do you control vermin?

It would also be a martin haven, a weasel paradise... snakes... plenty of predators love that sort of place.

A couple of Rat Terriers or Jack Russels would be in doggy heaven and soon have that little problem under control if it developed to an unmanageable extent. A living hedge wouldn't keep cows in but a combo of living and dead hedge would. They don't tend to push through what they can't see through. Ross isn't building his hedge next to the buildings so I don't think it much of an issue regardless. Critters have got to live some where and they all have their places in the scheme of things.

I have some old mesh fencing with mature 20 foot brush growing through it. Some of sections of wire are on the ground and grown over from lack of maintenance over the last 50 years. I don't want to cut the brush out to clear old rusty wire on the ground and then have a bare spot in the living brush and the cows track those spots down pretty quickly. I don't know why I didn't think of dead hedging those missing wire sections, but its the solution to the problem. Some dead hedging stuffed in the living hedge that I already have. Who would have thunk it?

Beef liver is tough for two reasons. One, it is from an old animal and two, it has been over cooked and at too high a temperature. Slice the liver thick and dredge it in a seasoned flour of your choosing and fry it low and slow in hot lard until just barely cooked through. I use pork lard, because I have lots and I want to caramelize my onions in the seasoned liver bits when I am done with the liver.

To get rid of the bitter taste soak the liver in milk. Lots and lots of milk. I have 4 jersey cows so I can afford to do it for 2 or three days changing the milk daily 2x if needed. If the liver is from an old or grain fed steer, the milk will turn into a gelatine like pink pudding. Rinse it off into the compost bucket and pour on fresh milk. Keep soaking until the milk stops jelling. Fry as above. So tender almost too tender and no more bitterness because the milk will have drawn out the icky stuff. Seriously, butchers these days slice the liver too thin like minute steaks and its almost impossible to do a good job cooking it. Next time,try slicing your liver yourself about 1/2" thick.

There is plenty of evidence that the new decline of the Roman empire has begun. When it ends or how it plays out is any bodies guess. I feel it is prudent to go back to my roots and get serious about taking care of me and mine and maybe a few others, because no one else will, and my well being isn't a problem that should be foisted on to others when I have the means to do something about it now at this moment.

It used to be normal to produce the family's food and basic needs to at least get through the winter. Not any more. Doing so now, earns one the title of prepper as if thinking ahead and taking responsibilty is a bad thing. Look at what people are reduced to with a simple job loss. If they had prepped a little when times were good, they would have had more options when things went south. Just take a look at how quickly the lines form at the food banks after an industry such as oil starts laying off; it is as soon as the unemployment insurance runs out at around the six week mark. Very few are prepared to hang on a bit longer and now their choices are severely limited. Beg or starve. What is the true cost of the latest phone, new sofa, truck or big house in those terms? Most preppers who are not rolling in dough do without and stock up now in the good times to buy some security for the bad. They are buying themselves peace of mind. It doesn't matter if the disaster hits in their lifetime or not.

Prepping is not hoarding; another word used to belittle the practise. No one is buying up all the food in a crisis. It is food that is readily available to everyone in a time of plenty and purchasing it is legal and not forcing any one to starve. Just think of a prepper as the same way you would a coupon clipper. Coupon clipper doesn't sound like being one step away from being an axe murderer and we can all sleep easy now.

A great number of preppers know what a permie or homesteader knows; it takes a lot of time to get a garden/farm up and running and make all the mistakes. Prepping buys one that time until one can produce the food from a source other than a grocery store shelf. Strange, but it is not considered prepping once a food is obtained by sweat equity directly from the land. Then you are either a hippy or a greedy farmer; best not to do anything at all and join the lemmings going over the cliff so that every one can keep having happy feelings all day long. Another thing to consider, preppers in urban settings are forced stock mini grocery stores, because the laws are such that they cannot grow anything but grass and flowers and most of us here know how wrong that is. Should someone be labeled crazy because they aren't out competing for bread and milk when the snow comes calling and there really is limited amounts available to the angry hoards?

I have a wind and solar system, batteries and a 5000W inverter. You cannot run, electric stoves, water heaters or dryers. They are just too big of a drain. Smaller appliances like microwaves, toasters, toaster ovens may be used one at time, sometimes two, if your system/inverter is large enough. Even though your inverter says its good for 2400 watts it is just like running a generator. You must take into account the start up load as well as the running load. Just as important, large appliances drain batteries very quickly and in almost all home systems, faster than the batteries can be recharged. On a strictly solar system, there is the added problem of no recharging at all during the dark hours. As mentioned before, a propane stove is far superior to electric and not just because they don't use electricity.